Vmyths.com
I remember about an email that I recieved a few years ago. It said I had just qualified for $1000.00 prize from Microsoft, courtesy of Bill Gates. All I had to do was send in a credit card number and an expiration date. In the back of my mind, I heard a little voice that said if it is too good to be true, it probably is. And this was. A few days later, I got an email clearing up the details.
But there is always someone out the looking to either separate us from our money, or put a bug in our computer, or just mess with our minds. Today’s Family First Site is a great clearinghouse for this sort of information on just this sort of stuff. It is called Vmyths.com, a site that has everything you wanted to know and then some. There are great articles on the latest bogus viruses, non-existent scams, and links to all the above. The data here is very accurate and up to date, and is constantly updated. It is always topical.
Forewarned is forearmed, in my opinion. Here is the best site to get warned that I have found recently.
http://www.vmyths.com/
Unless the site has changed radically in the last few months, the author of this site is very sarcastic and often borders on profane.
A much more family-friendly site for checking virus hoaxes is the U.S. Department of Energy Hoaxbusters page at “http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/”.
The best site I’ve found, for either verifying or debunking virus rumors, is ABOUT.COM. Specifically urbanlegends.about.com if I suspect it’s just a rumor; if it turns out to be true, there will be a link to the applicable page at antivirus.about.com to explain how to get rid of it and/or how to prevent your machine from getting infected.
Bryan, I think the site you’re talking about is :
http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/nethoaxes/
Another classic that has been online forever:
http://www.snopes.com/
I use both when I get my annual spam from a well meaning member at my church entitled “Madalyn Murray O’Hair vs. Religious Broadcasting”
As a computer professional, I am constantly sending the following link to my friends, clients and family members when they send me offending emails, rather than try to explain that you can’t get $500 from microsoft for sending out 50 emails :)
http://www.nonprofit.net/hoax/
It has a comprehensive list of all the different hoaxes, spam emails and urban legends, etc.
see you again sometime..